Pit of despair - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The pit of despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist

Comparative psychology

Comparative psychology generally refers to the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals. However, scientists from different disciplines do not always agree on this definition...

Harry Harlow

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development...

for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque

Rhesus Macaque

The Rhesus macaque , also called the Rhesus monkey, is one of the best-known species of Old World monkeys. It is listed as Least Concern in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in view of its wide distribution, presumed large population, and its tolerance of a broad range of habitats...

monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

in the 1970s. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of clinical depression. Researcher Stephen Suomi described the device as "little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom":

A 3/8 in. wire mesh floor 1 in. above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel. The chamber was equipped with a food box and a water-bottle holder, and was covered with a pyramid top [removed in the accompanying photograph], designed to discourage incarcerated subjects from hanging from the upper part of the chamber.

Harlow had already placed newly born monkeys in isolation chambers for up to one year. With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days, they had stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner.

Background

Much of Harlow's scientific career was spent studying maternal bond

Maternal bond

The maternal bond is typically the relationship between a mother and her child.While it typically occurs due to pregnancy and childbirth, it may also occur between a woman and an unrelated child, such as in adoption...

ing, what he described as the "nature of love". These experiments involved rearing newborn monkeys with surrogate mothers, ranging from toweling covered cones to a machine that modeled abusive mothers by assaulting the baby monkeys with cold air or spikes. The point of the experiments was to pinpoint the basis of the mother-child relationship, namely whether the infant primarily sought food or affection. Harlow concluded it was the latter.

In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression

Depression (mood)

Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...

. He was treated and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater

Lauren Slater

Lauren Slater is an American psychologist and writer. She is the author of six books, including Welcome To My Country , Prozac Diary , and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir...

writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor. He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation

Solitude

Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with people. It may stem from bad relationships, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders or circumstances of employment or situation .Short-term solitude is often valued as a time when one...

and depression.

Harlow's first experiments involved isolating a monkey in a cage surrounded by steel walls with a small one-way mirror, so the experimenters could look in, but the monkey could not look out. The only connection the monkey had with the world was when the experimenters' hands changed his bedding or delivered fresh water and food. Baby monkeys were placed in these boxes soon after birth; four were left for 30 days, four for six months, and four for a year.

After 30 days, the "total isolates," as they were called, were found to be "enormously disturbed." After being isolated for a year, they barely moved, did not explore or play, and were incapable of having sexual relations. When placed with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death.

Harlow also wanted to test how isolation would affect parenting skills, but the isolates were unable to mate. Artificial insemination

Artificial insemination

Artificial insemination, or AI, is the process by which sperm is placed into the reproductive tract of a female for the purpose of impregnating the female by using means other than sexual intercourse or natural insemination...

had not then been developed; instead, Harlow devised what he called a "rape rack," to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture. He found that, just as they were incapable of having sexual relations, they were also unable to parent their offspring, either abusing or neglecting them. "Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were," he wrote. Having no social experience themselves, they were incapable of appropriate social interaction. One mother held her baby's face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another crushed her baby's head. Most of them simply ignored their offspring.

These experiments showed Harlow what total and partial isolation did to developing monkeys, but he felt he had not captured the essence of depression, which he believed was characterized by feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and a sense of being trapped, or being "sunk in a well of despair," he said.

Vertical chamber apparatus

The technical name for the new depression chamber was "vertical chamber apparatus," though Harlow himself insisted on calling it the "pit of despair." He had at first wanted to call it the "dungeon of despair," and also used terms like "well of despair," and "well of loneliness." Blum writes that his colleagues tried to persuade him to not to use such descriptive terms, that a less visual name would be easier politically. Gene Sackett of the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

in Seattle, one of Harlow's doctoral students who went on to conduct additional deprivation studies, said, "He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair. Can you imagine the reaction to that?"

Most of the monkeys placed inside it were at least three months old and had already bonded with others. The point of the experiment was to break those bonds in order to create the symptoms of depression. The chamber was a small, metal, inverted pyramid, with slippery sides, slanting down to a point. The monkey was placed in the point. The opening was covered with mesh. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to climb up the slippery sides. After a few days, they gave up. Harlow wrote, "most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless." Stephen J. Suomi, another of Harlow's doctoral students, placed some monkeys in the chamber in 1970 for his PhD. He wrote that he could find no monkey who had any defense against it. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. He concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was no defense against depression.

The experiments delivered what science writer Deborah Blum

Deborah Blum

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York....

has called "common sense results," namely, that monkeys, normally very social animals in nature, emerge from isolation badly damaged, and that some recover while others do not.

Reaction

The experiments were condemned, both at the time and later, from within the scientific community and elsewhere in academia. In 1974, American literary critic Wayne C. Booth

Wayne C. Booth

Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago...

wrote that, "Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance—that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties." He writes that Harlow made no mention of the criticism of the morality of his work.

Harlow's colleagues and doctoral students also expressed concern. Sackett told Blum that, in his view, the animal liberation movement

Animal liberation movement

The animal-liberation movement, sometimes called the animal-rights movement, animal personhood, or animal-advocacy movement, is a social movement which seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and...

in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow's experiments.

Charles Snowdon, a junior member of the faculty at the time, who became head of psychology at Wisconsin, said that Harlow had himself been very depressed by his wife's cancer. Snowdon was appalled by the design of the vertical chambers. He asked Suomi why they were using them, and Harlow replied, "Because that's how it feels when you're depressed." Leonard Rosenblum, who studied under Harlow, told Lauren Slater that Harlow enjoyed using shocking terms for his apparatus because "he always wanted to get a rise out of people."

Another of Harlow's students, William Mason, who also conducted deprivation experiments elsewhere, said that Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

Background

Vertical chamber apparatus

Reaction

See also

Further reading